Beyond World's End

Beyond World’s End

Slowly we were becoming barbarians. In a good way. That is, we were transitioning to a technology and a culture that one family could manage sustainably. Dad’s hope was that we’d end up with bronze age skills; crude smelting, metal plows, leather, coarse hand-knit clothing and subsistence animal husbandry, as our twenty-first century artifacts failed us one by one. Of course, if we didn’t learn how to do those things we could plummet right on down to hunting and gathering in deerskins.

In regard to modern clothing we had a limited number of pieces and needed to ration due to wear and tear. I had to save the warmest for winter, so I gathered all the solid-color curtains from the station and devised a way to use the fabric to make a kilt-like garment. Like a weather-beaten highlander I kept the rest of my muscular, hairy self bare in a wide range of conditions. It was surprisingly liberating to let my equipment swing free underneath. Glad of my foreskin, I clambered around Bald Ridge like a real mountain man.

Mom had her own skirts and went topless mostly, too. Amongst all the newly enlivened wonders of nature around me I savored seeing her swelling mammaries swing free the most. I supposed, if Beth and Delandra became part of the family, that she would be a sort of mother to us all while my baby grew in her. The girls, as we called them, were sharing the small stock of shirts we had. I didn’t know how many panties mom had to share but it wouldn’t be long before we all went commando. Or maybe we’d all be wearing loin cloths eventually.

In their first week at the station the girls slowly recovered, helping my mother in her lush, green garden. I couldn’t get a word out of them. Dad apparently scared them even more with the red and black tattoos all down his front. I could sympathize. Six-foot-two, hairy and half-naked, in our beards, dark tans and often dirty from the hard work of prepping for winter, me in my kilt, dad looking like an extra from Deliverance, we must have seemed like barbarians to them, too. My pre-event self would have been wary. And in awe.

After my first family orgy I had begun bunking with mom and dad downstairs in their room full of mirrors. I liked watching us all fucking, too. Strangely, it was less lonely. I hadn’t pulled up the Brandi Love video since that night. The girls were given the room that had been mine up the creaky stairs. It became a ritual for mom to sit with them until they fell asleep, curled together like kittens, she reported.

On the second night after their appearance, and after mom put them to bed, we three were in our bedroom, showered and glad to all be together again. Mom clung to dad and I ran my hand affectionately along the line of her hip, thinking of the view from Bald Ridge where the folded Appalachians looked like soft ranks of sleeping women.

“I know this is new territory,” I said, “this idea of my sperm repopulating the world, but is Beth even old enough to have a baby? She looks like she’s maybe fifteen.”

“Before she spoke a word to me,” said dad, “she showed me her visa. Like I was going to deport her or something. She’s nineteen. South Korean.”

“You two are getting a little ahead of the script, I’m afraid,” cautioned mom, “They’re traumatized. I think it’ll freak them out to bring up our sexual situation too soon, let alone broach the idea that they need to get pregnant.”

“You mean,” said dad, “that you don’t want them to know that Jack’s the father of your child.”

“Well, that, yes, not yet,” she offered, “and maybe we shouldn’t be having our orgies where they might see.”

“Even off by the pond?” I asked. I really liked having sex with mom and dad by the pond.

“Even there,” mom affirmed, “Maybe just keep sex to this bedroom.”

“But we’ll have to be quieter,” I complained, “and half of the fun of sex is working ourselves up all day. We can’t grab-ass and fondle in the garden?”

“And,” observed dad, “we’re going to have to tell them eventually.”

“I think they’ll accept it pretty quick, “I said, “my generation is more open to alternative relationships. I mean, they already must have noticed we sleep all in the same room.”

“But incest?” mom insisted, “Isn’t that a bit too far?”

“Not under the circumstances. You convinced me of the reason in it.”

“You’re a sex-starved nineteen year old. It wasn’t that difficult.

“Have you considered that they might be sex-starved, too?” I countered.

“Jack, honey, I think they’re lesbians. I mean, judging from how they act with each other.”

“Oh, Mel,” said dad, “You’re jumping to conclusions. Just because they sleep curled up together like kittens doesn’t mean they’re exclusive.”

“And I think you two are afflicted with wishful thinking,” laughed mom.

“OK,” I relented, “Let’s keep the heavy foreplay and sex to the bedroom and let the girls set the pace in how we share this information. If they ask, we tell.”

*******

We had so many questions for them! But we were patient while mom nursed the girls back to health. She learned that they’d taken most of the last year to travel on foot from Roanoke, Virginia across about two-hundred and fifty miles to our redoubt in eastern Kentucky, mostly following Interstate 81. The girls were so traumatized that they hardly spoke even to her. They were inseparable, often holding hands, even going to the privy together.

On the fourth morning I offered Beth a handful of blackberries as we worked the garden. Mom had cut her straight, black hair to a short page-boy. Her t-shirt said If You’re Not Part Of The Solution, You’re Part Of The Precipitate. Her asian face, so unlined and childlike, turned up to me with a hint of curiosity. Behind her thick-rimmed glasses I noted walnut brown eyes. I ate a berry. The thin girl cautiously held out her palm. She smiled tentatively and made a little bow when I put the berries in her small hand. The girl popped a berry in her mouth. I noticed her small, white teeth. Beth murmured a thank you and bent back to her pea picking. It was a step forward.

On the sixth day, at the family table in the kitchen, Dad stood with his arms crossed, in his most serious mood. Clearly he wanted data to draw conclusions that might help us understand what happened. He was barefoot but still had on the dirty, ragged overalls he wore most of the time. His beard was fairly neat. Mom wore the tattered, soft sweatshirt that she used when she cooked on the woodstove we’d put under a shelter in the yard.

Dad began, “Did you see any other folks on your way?” They shook their heads. “Why were you heading west?”

“Ron,” cautioned mom, “this isn’t an interrogation.” She took them each by the hand. “We know you’ve seen some horrible things and you’re scared. I hope you’ll feel safe here. I do.”

I just watched, eager to see life in these women. In my and my parent’s minds was the idea that humankind now had a wider DNA pool to draw from if it really was our task to repopulate the planet. I kinda felt like even if it wasn’t some cosmically ordained fate, that I’d give it my very best effort anyway. It sure was fun trying to impregnate my mother. Her baby bump proved that my sperm were viable. I was proud of myself. I felt like a barbarian of the Conan type – tall, muscled, tan and virile. A man in command of his world. Able to face any challenge and rise to it. If that meant impregnating these two as well….

“Do you remember where you were when what we call ‘the event’ happened? When everyone else disappeared?” asked mom gently.

Beth stole a quick glance at Delandra and said, shyly, her thick accent hinting that she was in the States to study, “we were in our dorm room doing, uhh, stuff.”

“Oh, what school?” asked mom, clearly interested.

“Hollins,” said Beth, pushing her glasses up.

“That’s an all-women’s school, isn’t it?” observed mom, “I know a couple of very good biologists who graduated from there.”

Beth was showing some energy now. “I’m majoring in environmental studies.”

Delandra looked up for the first time. “I’m biology.”

“Ron and I are biologists, too, Delandra. You two have skills we really need now.”

Beth was slight and struggling to put on weight after their trek and she was lost in mom’s smallest t-shirt. It was hard to tell, but she looked to have tiny boobs to go with her skinny frame. Delandra, though, had some meat on her bones and fuller breasts and an ass that filled out her borrowed plaid shirt. Her legs were lean and well muscled from the long walk. She sported a sleek, short, roughly scissored afro.

“We were going to Lexington. Where my parents live,” said Delandra, warming. “They’re teachers at UK.”

“Oh! We’re here on a grant…or rather, were here on a grant from UK.” said mom, “What college?”

“Ag, Food and Environment,” said the black girl, “I want to be like them.” She looked deeply sad then and began quietly weeping.

Mom hugged the girl to her soft bosom and rocked her for a bit. “What are your parent’s names, Delandra?” She looked meaningfully at dad.

“Denise and Gerard Holloway.”

“My god,” whispered mom, “They oversaw this grant. We knew them.”

“Beth, Delandra,” dad said with a sigh, “I think we should be accustomed to assuming that everyone we knew is gone.” Now mom was looking daggers at him. “Until the unlikely event we’re proven wrong.”

“Ron, these two already proved you wrong.” Mom was quietly fuming. That night the conversation was over. We reverted to letting them set the pace.

*******

Late September in the Eastern Kentucky mountains brought cooler nights. Good for our garden, it rained about a third of the days of every month of the year, but late season thunderstorms could be fierce. It was a luxury for me to climb Bald Ridge to watch the clouds building and building over the western Appalachians on a late summer afternoon. I felt powerful up where I could see so far beyond our small clearing in the forest and could have spent hours. But there was too much work to do. We put in a lot of time harvesting now and stocking my root cellar. For good or ill we were going to be eating a lot of potatoes.